Storm for the Living and the Dead Read online

quite young and neat

  going out for food and

  toilet paper

  they are one of the loveliest

  couples in the

  neighborhood.

  “Texsun”

  she’s from Texas and weighs

  103 pounds

  and she stands before the

  mirror combing strands and

  strands of reddish hair

  which falls all the way down

  her back to her ass.

  the hair is magic and shoots

  sparks and I lay on the bed

  and watch her combing her

  hair. she’s like a nymph

  out of the movies but she’s

  actually there. we make love

  at least once a day and

  she can make me laugh

  with any sentence she cares

  to say. Texas women have always

  been immensely beautiful and

  healthy, and besides that she’s

  cleaned my refrigerator, my sink,

  the bathroom, and she cooks and

  feeds me healthy foods

  and washes the dishes to top

  that.

  “Hank,” she told me,

  holding up a can of grapefruit

  juice, “this is the best of them

  all.”

  it says “Texsun—unsweetened

  PINK grapefruit juice.”

  she looks like Katharine Hepburn

  must have looked while she was

  in high-school, and I watch those

  103 pounds

  combing a yard and some change

  of glinting reddish hair

  before the mirror

  and I can feel her inside of my

  wrists and at the backs of my eyes,

  and the toes and legs and belly

  of me feel her and

  the other part too,

  and all of Los Angeles falls down

  and weeps in joy,

  the walls of the love parlors shake,

  the ocean rushes in and she turns

  to me and says, “damn this hair!”

  and I say,

  “yes.”

  warm water bubbles

  what I like

  is when I’m in the bathtub

  and I fart

  and that fart is so bad

  that I can smell the stink

  of it

  up through the water.

  the pleasure of power:

  Mahatma Gandhi dying.

  the iris in drag.

  love is wonderful

  but so is the stench of the

  innards,

  the coming forth of the hidden

  parts.

  the fart. the turd. the death of

  a lung.

  bathtub rings, shit-rings in toilets

  dying bulls dragged across Mexican dirt

  Benito Mussolini and his whore Claretta

  being hung by their heels

  and torn to pieces by the mob—

  these things have more gentle glory

  than any Christ with His

  perfectly-placed wounds.

  I read (and I no longer know which side

  did it) that in the Russian revolution

  they’d catch a man, cut him open, nail

  part of his intestine to a tree

  then force him to run around and around

  that tree, rolling his intestines about

  the trunk. I’m no sadist. I’d probably

  weep if I had to see it, probably go mad.

  but I do know that we are much more than

  we think we are

  even though the romantics

  concentrate upon the hate/and or/love of

  the heart.

  a fart in the bathtub contains a whole

  essential history of the human race.

  love is so wonderful.

  so is the fart.

  especially mine.

  dying bulls being dragged across the Mexican

  dirt and me in the bathtub

  looking up at a 60-watt bulb and feeling all right.

  a corny poem

  we lived in a hotel next to a

  vacant lot

  where somebody was growing a

  garden

  which included these long

  cornstalks

  and we came out of the corner bar

  at 2 A.M.

  and started walking

  toward our place

  and when we got to the vacant

  lot she said, “I want some

  corn!”

  and I followed her out and

  I said, “shit, this stuff

  isn’t ripe yet . . .”

  “yes, it is . . . I’ve got to

  have some corn . . .”

  we were always hungry and

  she started ripping off

  these ears of corn and

  stuffing them into her purse

  and down her blouse and

  I looked up the street and

  saw the squad car coming

  and I said, “it’s the cops,

  run!”

  they had the red lights on

  and we ran toward our

  apartment house, down the

  front walk . . .

  “HALT OR I’LL FIRE!”

  and down the stairway to

  the basement elevator

  which happened to be there

  and we closed the doors and

  hit the button #4

  as they stood down there

  pushing buttons. we got

  out and left the elevator

  doors open, ran down to our

  apartment, got in, locked the door

  and sat in the dark

  listening and drinking cheap

  wine. we heard them out there

  walking around. they finally

  gave up but we left the lights

  out and she boiled the ears of

  corn, we sat in the dark a

  long time listening to the ears

  of corn boil and drinking the

  cheap wine. we took the corn

  out and tried to eat it. it

  was undeveloped, we were nibbling

  at murders, at miscarriages of

  nature.

  “I told you this shit wasn’t ready,”

  I said.

  “it’s ready,” she said, “for Christ’s

  sake, eat it!”

  “I’ve tried,” I said, “Lord God knows

  how I’ve tried . . .”

  “be glad you’ve got this corn,” she said,

  “be glad you’ve got me.”

  “the corn is green,” I said, “green as

  caterpillars in April . . .”

  “it’s good, it’s good, this corn is good,”

  she said

  and started throwing ears of it at me.

  I threw the ears back.

  we finished the wine and went to sleep.

  in the morning when we awakened here were

  these tiny little ears of corn all over the

  rug and on the sofa and on the chairs.

  “where’d this crap come from?” she asked.

  “the Jolly Green Giant,” I said, “shit us

  a tubful.”

  “in this world,” she said, “a girl can

  never tell what she’s going to wake up

  with.”

  “something hard,” I answered, “is better

  than nothing.”

  she got up and took a shower and I turned

  over and went back to sleep.

  the ladies of the afternoon

  no more ladies knock on my door

  at 3 A.M.

  with ready bottle and ready body;

  they arrive at 2:30 in the afternoon

  and talk about the soul,

  and they look better than the old girls
/>
  did, but the understanding is clear—

  no one-night stands,

  I must buy the whole package;

  they know Manet from Mozart, they know all the

  Millers, and will sip on a bit of wine

  but just a bit, and their breasts are vast and

  firm

  and their asses are sculptured by

  sex-fiends;

  they know the philosophers, the politicians and

  the tricks;

  they have minds and bodies,

  and they sit and look at me and say,

  “you seem a little nervous. is everything

  all right?”

  “o yes,” I say, “fine,” thinking what the hell is

  this?

  I’m not going to waste a month to get a pinch of

  buttock;

  and such terribly beautiful eyes, o yes,

  the witches!

  how they smile, knowing what you are

  thinking—

  to place them on a bed and be done with it—

  fuck yes!—

  but this is an inflationary age

  and with them

  you must pay first, during and

  afterwards. it’s

  the emancipated female, and I am no longer a

  schoolboy, and I allow them to leave

  untouched, most of them with a wrecked man or two

  behind them already,

  and still in their 20’s, and a meeting is arranged for later

  in the week, and they leave

  dangling their eternal price

  behind them

  like their beautiful asses,

  but I find myself writing,

  the next day,

  “Dear K . . . : Your beauty and youth are simply too

  much for me. I do not deserve

  you, so therefore I ask that we break our relationship,

  as small as that may have

  been . . .

  yours,

  . . .”

  then I smile, fold the letter, put it in the envelope, lick it

  closed, add stamp,

  and I walk down the street

  to the nearest mailbox

  keeping the emancipated woman as free as she

  should be, and not doing too badly

  toward myself

  either.

  tongue-cut

  he lives in the back and comes to my door

  carrying his shotgun in one hand.

  “listen,” he says, “there was a guy sitting

  on your couch on the porch while you were

  gone. he didn’t act right. I asked him what

  he wanted, he said he wanted to see you.

  I told him you weren’t in. do you know a

  tall black guy named ‘Dave’?”

  “I dunno nobody like that . . .”

  “I saw this guy on the street later and I

  asked him what he was doing in the neighbor-

  hood.”

  “I don’t know no tall black named ‘Dave.’”

  “I’ve been watching your place. I ran off a couple

  of those Germans. you don’t want to see any Germans,

  do you?”

  “no, Max, I don’t like Germans, Frenchmen and especially

  I don’t like Englishmen. Mexicans and Greeks are all

  right but there is something I don’t like about the looks on their

  faces.”

  “there have been more Germans than any other kind.”

  “run them off . . .”

  “o.k., I will . . . when you leaving town again?”

  “tomorrow.”

  “tomorrow . . . ?”

  “tomorrow, yes, and if you find some fucker sitting on

  my porch couch, blow his god damned head off . . .”

  “o.k., I will . . .”

  “thanks, Max . . .”

  “it’s all right . . .”

  he walks back to his court in the back with his

  shotgun and

  goes inside.

  “my god,” says Linda Lee, “you know what you’ve

  done?”

  “yes,” I say.

  “he believes in you. when we come back there’ll be

  a dead body on the porch.”

  “all right . . .”

  “don’t you remember when I took my day of silence?

  you told him you had cut my tongue out . . . and he

  accepted it matter of factly . . .”

  “Max is the only real buddy I’ve

  got . . .”

  “you’re an accessory to the fact . . .”

  “I don’t like uninvited guys sitting around on my porch

  couch waiting for me . . .”

  “suppose it’s some poet, some guy who admires your

  work?”

  “like I said, ‘Max is the only real buddy I’ve got.’

  let’s start packing . . .”

  “what happened to my green dress?”

  she asks.

  Venice, Calif., nov. 1977:

  leary’s long gone and the drop-out area he created:

  the junkies, the crazies, the fanatics, the general

  rush of idiots have long ago been taken care of by

  the institutions, including the institution of death.

  lsd is almost out, speed is standard, reds are rare,

  joints aren’t brave, coke and H are too expensive,

  roller-skates and racquet-ball are in; less guitars,

  less bongos, less blacks; the natives now huckster baggage

  and small items from vans while their stereo sets

  no longer play Bob Dylan, they have become minor

  capitalists, nothing wearying, just a hype, and the

  ten-speed bike, they ride the ten-speed bike as if

  in the dream, all the revolutions are over but there is

  still an anarchist or two under the palms, tamping their

  pipes and planning to blow up some damn thing for no

  damned reason and the sea goes in and out, out and in,

  and over in Santa Monica the musclemen are still there,

  although they aren’t the same musclemen, and the sea

  goes in and out, and there’s no Vietnam to protest, hardly

  anything to do, racquet-ball, roller-skates and ten-speed,

  and fucking is almost a bore, it means trouble, you know,

  and cheap wine is in, and you can use a do-it-yourself car

  wash for twenty-five cents.

  mirror

  women at my dresser mirror

  there have been so many women

  at my dresser mirror

  combing their hair

  the comb catching

  and I see in their eyes in

  the mirror as they look

  at me

  stretched on the bed.

  I am almost always on the bed

  it’s my favorite place.

  that love or even

  relationships

  stop

  seems so very odd

  but that new loves

  new relationships

  arrive

  that’s lucky.

  even though solitude is

  good

  loneliness seems

  imperfect.

  all those faces in the

  mirror

  I remember them.

  blossoms of feeling and

  humor,

  I’ve been treated well

  most of the

  time.

  the women are now

  in front of other mirrors

  and the men stretch on the beds

  I’m sure—

  conversing, or

  silent, relaxing.

  another woman uses

  my mirror

  her name is Linda Lee

  she laughs at me

  I have on a black and white
>
  Japanese “happy coat.”

  maybe she will stay in my

  mirror.

  head jobs

  she’s still doing it.

  she sculpts men’s heads

  then goes to bed with

  them

  I guess to match the clay

  with the flesh.

  that’s how I met

  her.

  I didn’t object

  but in such cases

  you always feel that it is

  you.

  but afterwards

  I found out

  that I was not the

  first

  and after I began living with

  her

  I’d look at these sculpted heads

  of men

  on this table

  and on top of the tv set

  and

  here and there

  and I’d think,

  my oh my.

  and then she’d tell me,

  “listen, you know whose head I’d

  like to sculpt?”

  “uh uh.”

  “I’d like to sculpt big Mike

  Swinnert . . . he has an interesting skull . . .

  did you ever notice his mouth, his

  teeth?”

  “yes, I have . . .”

  “I like his wife too. but I think I’d like

  to do Mike first . . . you wouldn’t be

  jealous, would you?”

  “ah, no. I’ll go to the track or something

  so you can concentrate . . .”

  “it’s kind of embarrassing for me to

  ask him. he’s your friend. would you

  mind asking . . . ?”

  Mike didn’t have a car so I picked him

  up and drove him over. as I parked outside

  he said, “listen, I can fuck her if I want

  to, you know. do you mind if I fuck her?”

  “well, I guess I would,” I said.

  he gave me that glance: “all right,

  for your sake, I won’t.”

  I walked him into the clay and then went

  back downstairs.

  I drove out to the track and had

  a terrible day at the

  track . . .

  I once walked through McArthur Park

  with her as she picked out men with

  interesting heads and

  I went up to them and asked if she

  might sculpt their heads. I even

  offered them money. they all

  refused, feeling that something was

  wrong. I too felt that something was

  wrong, especially with me.

  it wasn’t much after that when

  the sculptress and I

  split.

  she even moved out of town but